Email systems allow people to distribute the same message to multiple recipients. Messages distributed to multiple recipients are often referred to as “group messages”. Although the sender may consider the content of the message to be important, some recipients might disagree on the value of the message. Unsolicited email messages, particularly unsolicited group messages, are commonly referred to as “SPAM”. Some SPAM comes from innocent sources such as overly enthusiastic friends and relatives forwarding a joke to everyone in their address book. Other times, however, SPAM is the result of mass marketing or even a computer virus.
Another problem with group messages arises in the workplace. In an effort to communicate information across large working groups, messages are often sent to large groups of recipients. Many of the recipients really do not need the information. Workers become inundated with a high volume of unnecessary or repetitive messages. Dealing with and filtering out all these messages takes time and network bandwidth, resulting in a drop in productivity.
Many email readers and other commercial products are designed to identify and filter SPAM. SPAM filters use sender information, subject lines and even message content to identify unwanted email messages. Commercial SPAM filters can be effective for most commercial group messages, but are less effective in the situation of internal corporate communications. Workers at a company generally expect to receive individual or group messages from co-workers. Conventional SPAM filters often remove the relevant along with the irrelevant when used to filter out internal corporate communications. This problem of over-filtering group messages not only applies to the corporate world, but to other groups such as clubs, civic organizations, educational institutions or even families.
Thus, a need exists for an alternative to conventional SPAM filters that enables a user to manage the flow of information through email messages while minimizing the potential for over-filtering.